Tam looked at Wolam. His expression was unhappy, He pulled a comlink out from a pocket. "Tam Elgrin to Comm Main Control, put me through to the Intelligence office."

"This is Comm Main, say again your name and authority."

"This is Tam Elgrin. I'm one of the civilians on base."

"Oh. Right. You're that civilian. Who did you want again?"

"The Intelligence office."

"The Intelligence office isn't staffed every hour of the day, and you aren't authorized to demand the attention of the head of the department. I'm amazed you're authorized to remain on Borleias."

Tam covered over the microphone portion with his palm. He offered Wolam a cynical smile. "So my reputation is all in my imagination, huh?"

"Give me that."

Tam handed the comlink over.

"Hello, this is Wolam Tser. I, too, want to speak to the director of Intelligence, or the director of Security, and I mean immediately."

Tam moved to the keypad and tapped at several of its keys. There was an audible click from the lock and the door slid up and open. Beyond were floor-to-ceiling hanks of mechanical and electronic equipment and a narrow, worker-sized gap between them.

No, you're just Tam Elgrin again, changing his voice, and if you continue to broadcast on this frequency, I'm eoing to have you dragged through the kill zone behind a landspeeder."

"State your name and rank."

"I'm Warrant Officer Urman Nakk, Security."

"Warrant Officer Urman Nakk, Security, are you widely considered to be an idiot?"

"What?"

"Because in less than a day, I can guarantee that you will be. By your fellow security officers. By your superiors. By your family and your pets. By the officers who court-martial you. And the taint will stay with you throughout your life, because I am a brilliant historian and commentator and you are, at best, a mediocre desk pilot. This will happen despite your best efforts... unless you hand me over to one of the officers I asked for, right now!"

Tam gave Wolam a thumbs-up of approval. He took a step into the niche. Then he backed out again and bent over, studying the floor of the electronics-access closet. "I, ah, I, hold on."

Tam reached down to the seam where the metal floor of the closet met the duracrete floor of the hallway. He lifted, and the floor came up, revealing a hole in the duracrete beneath. The hole was smooth-edged but irregular, lacking the mathematically precise curve of something cut by machinery.

A noise floated up out of the hole. It seemed to come from a great distance, but it was recognizable: a wail of despair, of pain. Tam sat down at its edge, dangling his legs into the hole. "I'm going down."

"No, you're not,"

"I'm seizing the initiative, Wolam."

"No, you're waiting for an officer to come on rhe comlink."

Tam pushed the portion of metal flooring over until it leaned against a panel of machinery and would not fall across the hole. Then he slid down into the hole.

"Tam, blast it, don't do what I say, do what I mean."

Nine.

The tunnel did not descend in a straight line. Tam didn't expect it to. It was something of the Yuuzhan Vong, and they never did anything in straight lines.

But that, and the fact that it had been bored through duracrete, meant that Tam could clamber down rather than drop to a messy, bone-breaking stop at the bottom.

Another scream floated up at him, louder. A few meters down, the duraerete gave way to bedrock, then became duraerete again; it looked as though there were sub-basements below, levels that perhaps were not accessed by the public turbolifts and emergency stairwells, and the Yuuzhan Vong intruder had found them. Tam could see, even dig his fingers into smaller side holes in this tunnel; he supposed that whatever stone-eating organisms had made the tunnels had first dug around in all directions and then conveyed images or other knowledge to the Yuuzhan Vong spy who commanded them, allowing him or her to choose which path the main tunnel would follow.

He found a larger niche, two meters deep and one high. Its bottom was lined with some sort of mossy substance; he'd seen it before, one type of sleep surface.

There were also gelatinlike bags he knew to contain bio-engineered creatures that performed various functions when released from the jelly.

He'd possessed some of them when he served the Yuuzhan Vong.

There was another scream, and the sound of voices speaking. He slowed his descent, tried to make it quieter.

A few more meters, and the hole opened up into a chamber. Lights flickered red and blue down there, suggesting a computer terminal screen rather than overhead illumination.

And finally Tam could understand one of the voices. It was a male, and he spoke Basic with the halting accent and peculiar rhythm he'd come to associate with a member of the Yuuzhan Vong trying not to reveal his true origins.

"Where is the true crystal?" he asked.

There was no immediate response. Then there was another shriek. The next speaker also sounded male, though his words were distorted by pain: "It's gone. It's been taken to the pipefighter already."

"The pipefighter abominations are still in the flat building. They have not fired upon us. They leave the lambent in that building when guards are more numerous here?"

"Yes, yes-" There was another scream. This one went on and on, ending only as the second speaker ran out of wind.

Tam grimaced. He had to see what was going on in that chamber before he could act. But although he could wait here at the tunnel end, his legs braced at the side, for some time, he couldn't turn upside down to peek outside it. He wasn't that nimble.

Ah, but he had another set of eyes. Hurriedly, he took his light-duty holocam from around his neck. He detached its neck cord, attached it so that the unit could dangle, its lenses pointed to the side and its quick-review viewscreen oriented up toward him. He adjusted the lenses to wide-angle viewing, then lowered the unit to the very bottom of the tunnel and slightly beyond.

In the viewscreen, he could see the chamber below. It appeared that the tunnel was in the ceiling of one corner. The chamber itself was mostly lined with computer equipment, but in one corner was a doorway that probably led to a hallway or stairs, and in the opposite corner was a son of stall. This was about the same size as a refresher's shower and, like a shower, was bounded by transparent walls; in the bottom of the stall was a mound of what looked like broken transparisteel shards.

Next to the stall was a chair. In it sat a Bothan male, bound hand, arm, and foot. Leaning over him was a human male in a mechanic's jumpsuit.

Tam thought for a moment that the Bothan was diseased. There were irregular bumps on his face, on his fur wherever his garments did not cover it. Then he realized that the bumps were moving, writhing.

Bugs of some sort. As Tam watched, the mechanic Brought his hand to the Bothan's forehead. There was an audible crunching noise and the Bothan screamed again. When the mechanic lowered his hand, the Bothan's forehead had one more wiggling bump on it.

Wolam, where are you? But Tam realized that he could neither wait for Wolam to finish persuading the security forces to come, nor speed that process along. The Bothan might die, a death that truly would be on Tam's conscience. But what could he do? He took stock of his possessions.

One hand-sized holocam, various data cards, a comlink, a small vibroblade he'd always carried because it made him feel better, not because he knew how to use it well.

And his brain. A brain that didn't always work in an admirably efficient fashion.

He left the vibroblade switched off and put it between his teeth.

He had other tools. The chamber below was dark, lit only by terminal screens. Screams would cover small noises. And he was a strong man-though no fighter, he had size and muscle mass that fighters had often admired.

On the ledge where the moss grew, he set the holocam. He advanced it through its recording memory until he reached one recently recorded scene, then set it to play back on a sixty-standard-second timer.

He waited until he heard another question, answer, and scream. As the scream began, he lowered himself into the chamber below.

Now all the mechanic-a Yuuzhan Vong operative, it was obvious, possibly a warrior-had to do was turn his head to see Tam. One look, one attack, and Tam would be dead.

But the mechanic didn't turn. He leaned in close to witness the Bothan's agonies. Tam, at arm's extension, let go with one hand and swung, but the extra reach brought his toe into contact with the floor. A moment later, when with wrist strength he stopped swaying, he let go and stood.

And knelt. And immediately crept to the side of the room, huddling in the deep shadow beside a bank of unlit terminals, He took the vibroblade from his mouth, positioning it so that its switch was beneath his thumb.

He'd always been inconspicuous despite his size. Now he feared that, even with his best efforts and wishes, he wouldn't be inconspicuous enough. "Now, again. Where is the crystal-" A voice floated out of the tunnel Tam had just left, a woman speaking with a Corellian drawl: "Yes, we're going to pound the Vong, pretty much."

The mechanic snapped upright, turning to stare at the hole. His expression displayed no emotion, but his body language spoke eloquently of alarm, confusion.

The voice continued, "It doesn't matter how hard they hit us. We have twenty thousand years of galactic civilization to draw on. They can't ever destroy that."

The mechanic ran to stand beneath the hole, then leapt up.

Tam charged forward, thumbing the vibroblade on. He could see the Bothan's expression, alarm and pain, through the rivulets of blood that flowed down his face. Tam slashed the man's bonds, one-two-three, and they fell away from the Bothan. "Run," Tam whispered.

There was a crunching noise from the tunnel opening, hate-filled words in the Yuuzhan Vong language, then a scraping noise as the mechanic descended.

And there it was, a moment of decision, an initiative to seize or abandon. With it was fear, more fear than Tam had ever felt, even when he had been a Yuuzhan Vong captive and certain that every moment would be his last. Tam turned and charged back toward the hole. As he lurched forward, he saw the mechanic's legs descending, heels toward him, toes toward the corner.

The mechanic's feet hit the floor and he began to turn. Tam slammed into him with all his considerable mass, hammering him into the room's corner, stabbing wildly with the vibroblade, kneeing and screaming and battering. He felt blood on his knife hand, felt fingers around his left wrist.

Then his wrist was being twisted, mercilessly, as if by a machine, and he was facedown on the chamber floor. There was pain like an explosion in his left arm and when he twisted his head he could see that it was dislocated, the ball of his arm levered out of its socket.

He hurt too much to move, almost too much to hear, but he caught the mechanic's words: "You fight like child."

Then there was the sizzling noise of a blaster shot, a roar of such noises as a rifle on full autofire opened up. Blood sprayed down onto Tam's back.

The mechanic fell atop Tam. The mechanic's hand, vibroblade still held in it, hit the floor beside Tam's ear.

Tam strained to look up. The door into the chamber was open and uniformed security operatives were flooding in. With them was a brunette woman he'd seen around the base: lella Wessiri, head of Intelligence for this operation, General Antilles's wife.

She knelt before him and one of her men rolled the mechanic's body off. "Tam?" she asked. "Can you hear me?"

"I'm going to pass out now," he said.

And he did.

Aphran System, Aptiran IV They came for Han and Leia in the quietest hour of the night, rushing into their bedchamber and leveling blasters before the two of them could stagger out of bed.

Han stared into the bright lights affixed to the rifles.

"What's the meaning of this?" he asked. His voice was calm, the words perfunctory.

The leader of the intruders, only a silhouette behind the lights, answered, "Han Solo, Leia Organa Solo, you are charged with falsification of identification, smuggling, entering Aphran space on false pretenses, and crimes against the state."

"Is that all?" Han offered them a dismissive wave. "That's only a couple of hours' worth of crimes."

"Get up. Get dressed."

Han and Leia rose and began groping in the semi-darkness for their piratical garments.

R2-D2 whistled.

C-3PO, running through a self-diagnostic sequence in trickle-power mode, heard the alarm in his counterpart's musical tones and started up full-power mode. In a fraction of a second he regained use of his motivators and other systems.

They were where they'd been when he'd performed his partial power-down, in the now empty starboard cargo hold of the Millennium Falcon.

"What's that you say? Performing a bypass of what?"

The ominous clanking noise from the exterior cargo hatch just meters away made any answer unnecessary.

"Oh, dear, oh, dear." Surely there was some procedure in his memory for coping with an intrusion, but the only thing that occurred to the protocol droid was to run and hide.

The astromech whistled again at him, clearly irritated with him for dithering. R2-D2 leaned forward into wheeled-transport mode and rolled out of the bay into the circular corridor that provided access to most of the Falcon's compartments.

C-3PO trotted along after his partner. "Could you slow down? This is an undignified pace."

He followed the astromech into the stern compartment that provided access to the Falcon^ escape pods. R2-D2 already stood at the portmost pod, his manipulator arm activating its access button. The door slid partway open and then jammed. The data screen on the front read MALFUNCTION. But the astromech tapped on the button, a rhythm C-3PO did not recognize, and the door slid open the rest of the way.

That noise was drowned out by the groan of the starboard cargo hatch opening, by shouts of "Commence search!" and "Move all this out of here!"

C-3PO trotted into the pod after R2-D2. "This is entirely inappropriate," he said. "Master Han and Mistress Leia are not doing anything illegal."

The astromech whistled and tweetled at him as he activated the controls inside the pod.

"Oh, they are? Well, yes, 1 suppose illegal is defined by local authorities, so there would be variations causing an accidental violation of local ordinances." Tweetle. "What, on purpose?"

The escape pod hatch slid closed.

In the hour before dawn, R2-D2 finally opened the pod door and glided out again. The Millennium Falcon was quiet; sheltered from weather by the bay walls, she did not even creak under pressure from wind gusts.

"How very ominous," C-3PO said.

Tweetle.

"No, I will not be quiet."

Tweetle.